


Swirling Caramel Sentience

by AnEarHat



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Fluff, M/M, sentient tattoos, these cute butts being all cute and butt-like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:50:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnEarHat/pseuds/AnEarHat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first night that Cecil and Carlos spend together, Carlos asks about the swirling tattoos dancing around Cecil's arms. Cecil tells him and decides to get a new one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swirling Caramel Sentience

Carlos had noticed them before. It was hard not to, really. But he had never seen them up close, never been able to smell the sweet caramel scent eminating from them when they moved, never noticed how or when or why they moved, never saw the hundreds of subtle colours swimming among the blacks and purples of them, until the first night he and Cecil spent together. Cecil's tattoos, Carlos noticed, would stretch towards Carlos and swirl about the skin dreamily as the pair cuddled. They would blush slightly around the edges and began to move in rhythmic waves when Carlos began to kiss Cecil. They would swoon and go limp when Cecil's eyes filled with affection. And all the time they were moving, the subtly sweet caramel smell would swirl up in the warm air between them and kiss Carlos' nose. When Carlos stroked up Cecil's arm, the tattoos seemed to want to follow his finger, and did just that for as far as they could, floating back to their resting place when they had stretched after him far enough. Carlos asked Cecil about them.

"Oh, I was born with most of them. The bands around my arm here, the runes along my vein here, the purple smoke streams on my shoulders - though they kept on growing and didn't actually curl around eachother on my chest until I was fifteen - the eyes there, and whatever these things are. I was born with those ones. Some of them, like the smoke, grew as I went through puberty, like these branches and swirly things. And some of them... hold on," Cecil grinned, being the one to curl out of an embrace for possibly the first time in their short relationship, and padded through the beaded doorframe into his bedroom where Carlos heard him rummaging around in his impossibly messy drawers until he emerged with a small velvet box, his tattoos and his eyes vibrant with excitement. Kneeling back down before a grinning but perplexed Carlos, Cecil opened the box to reveal a chunk gold and purple fountain pen. Carlos picked it up and looked at Cecil with raised eyebrows. Cecil shifted some of the branches on his arm out of the way for a moment to clear a space, and held it out before a still perplexed Carlos. "Go on," Cecil urged, "use the pen."

The pen glided silkily over Cecil's skin, the nib humming quietly as Carlos signed his name in black ink speckled with thin strips of colours that couldn't even be explained, much like bird feathers in the sunlight. When the lid was replaced and the pen set back in the box, Cecil beamed at his Carlos and removed his pyjama t-shirt, "Watch," he murmured, as he pressed his finger onto the centre of the word and teased at the letters until they began to move with his finger. They followed his finger slowly, gracefully, as they were pulled up his arm and over his shoulder, down across his collarbone until they came to rest in the centre of Cecil's chest, right above the place where the swirling plumes of smoke curled around eachother on his breastbone. The letters made a contented sigh, or seemed to, happy with their placement and refusing to move too far away as they sank into the skin and blushed at Carlos' awe-striken face.

"That's... Cecil, how... and that's there for, um, forever?"

Cecil nodded, eyes on the floor and suddenly overcome with the notion that he had gone one step too far and scared Carlos away. This earned him gentle fingers at his chin, tipping it up so that his eyes could be met by those of Carlos; full of wonder and adoration. Cecil relaxed and Carlos, his own caring and reliable Carlos, kissed him gently on the lips, arms wrapping around him as his tattoos swam deliciously.

"You're sure you don't mind? You like it?"

Carlos answered by kissing him once more on the lips, once on his jaw, once on his neck, and once on his new signature-shaped tattoo, the taste of caramel and lilac on his lips as he stroked a hand over Cecil's cheekbone and whispered, "I love it."

**Author's Note:**

> Gah I'm sorry I'm actually not terribly fond of this one but I had these ideas and I needed to get them down, I just couldn't get them down in a way that I could be 100% happy with even though it's only short. Hope you enjoyed it anyway.


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